Sunday Is For Lovers: Zach & Bri Thompson
Sunday Is For Lovers Series, February 2021.
Millennial Love Stories is revisiting couples who’ve previously participated in the series who have chosen to share on their changes since their last interview. Today we share the story of Zach and Briana Thompson, both 31, currently residing in Philadelphia who also recently celebrated their first wedding anniversary.
On a Monday evening in January of 2021, Zach and Briana Thompson situated themselves in front of a laptop camera in their living room, logged in to Zoom and opened up to dialogue about their relationship. Their newborn son, Law, snuggled in his mother’s arms, occasionally requiring a little more attention than the gentle swaying she used to keep him sound asleep.
3 years have passed since we last spoke with Zach and Bri much has transpired: a beautiful proposal in the City of Light, a domestic destination wedding, career leaps, relocation and the arrival of their baby boy.
If a relationship is like a child, then the ultimate test of what it’s been taught has to be a global pandemic that halts day to day life, eliminating distractions and fillers, leaving those two people alone 24/7 with what they’ve built.
For Zach and Briana, it’s become clear that their work over the last ten years is fruitful.
“We had our schedules and all of that got interrupted and I was just like ‘you’re really my best friend’” Zach says thinking about how quarantine started for the two of them in Brooklyn, where, even though things in the world where growing increasingly chaotic, they found themselves having a good time just being together.
“2020 was a year that really confirmed that I genuinely like him.” Briana smiles, “We really get along, we communicate very well. All of the hard work that has been put in over the past ten years was proven.”
Briana lists the lessons that contribute to their survival of the pressure test: “Learning how to speak to each other, learning how to communicate, learning how to argue, learning how to express ourselves.” Skills that the pair apply with precision as they have navigated living in a pandemic world while pregnant, moving and transitioning careers and now as they continue their next chapter together as parents with individual pursuits and visions for all three as a family.
In November 2018 Zach and Bri headed to Paris. Would this be the big moment? At that point, 7 years in, they knew deeper commitment was on the horizon and what unfolded in Paris was a proposal that Zach intentionally held her in suspense about that turned out to be simply, perfect.
“Paris was epic, but the fact that our mothers were there was really what made it super special because I always knew I didn’t want to get engaged with a huge group of people. To have our moms showed me that he really understands my values” Briana recalls that day.
Wedding planning and preparing for a life together was the impetus for more individual reflection. Zach and Bri aren’t shy about setting audacious goals and 2019 proved to be a transition year as they both defined higher aspirations in their careers. At the time, Briana was still working a full-time role in the advertising industry and had been operating her lifestyle fitness brand, Spiked Spin, simultaneously for years. Zach was securely positioned within the finance sector but business school was calling him.
“2019 was the year that both of us were trying to really grasp what the next five to ten years will look like. I really committed to Spiked and entrepreneurship. For Zach, it was him thinking, ‘If I stay in this career, I'm going to be stuck. I don't want to do this. How do I pivot out? What do I do next?’", Briana explains.
And if transition and growth in a relationship requires anything, it certainly depends on highly developed communication skills. Building upon what was already a solid foundation, the couple embarked on regular marriage counseling on a bi-weekly schedule leading into their wedding.
“It cleared the air with a lot of stuff and gave us some tools to take a step back and rethink our approach to a particular problem” Zach speaks on the value of counseling.
Briana describes how counseling has allowed them to get into discussions about sensitive topics and recognize triggers for themselves and each other. Another benefit: learning how to approach an argument. No couple is immune to them, but approach just might be the key to surviving them. Each of them came to the table with opposite perspectives on what arguments meant for a relationship. To Bri, an argument felt like it could be the end of everything. To Zach, arguments were natural. They learned to meet each other in the middle.
“Zach needs to cool off. I’m someone who could just keep going. So we set a timeframe, an hour, to have some space and after that you have to come back to tackle whatever the issue is.”
In addition, they’ve gotten a better understanding of each other’s communication styles. “He doesn’t receive feelings, but that’s how I communicate with feelings, so I have to learn how to express my feelings.” Briana explains. “I can’t rely on ‘you made me sad’ I have to give him what the real issue is.”
Further, counseling has given them tools to create solutions to conflict rather than resting on differences.
Counseling makes you say, ‘What can you take from your side and my side and how do you create our best family?’” Briana states.
And in that shift of belief and mindset, the pair has found gold.
If you blinked, or put your phone down, you might have missed it. For 24 hours just a few days after their first wedding anniversary, Briana shared a carefully selected set of photos from the sacred day they exchanged vows on January 11th, 2020 in Miami, Florida. The photo spread lived in her Instagram stories and beautifully illustrated a moment in time when the world stood still just for them. Bitter sweetly, it conjured a longing for the before times when the idea of “going back to normal” was not a thing. The lucky ones caught a glimpse of the day they solidified their union as #TheThompsonTrust and, from the looks of the photos, it was a cinematic fairytale grounded by family, life-long friends, and authentic love.
As a standard practice in their relationship, leveraging social media to share the granular details of their love life and now their family is generally off limits.
“That’s been the standard since day one. The pre-Instagram days, Twitter days, it was like you could see they’re [other couples] subbing each other. No, we’re not about to do that,” Zach explains.
Briana adds “I like it to be un-infiltratable. I think there’s value in protecting our situation, our love, our marriage. I want you to know I have a husband, I want you to know he's here, he's supporting me. I want to give enough that people can know that my family is my priority, but I also want to keep enough that when I lay down at night I feel like I have something that's just for me.”
By March of 2020, when the pandemic set in here in the States, the couple had already taken on massive life changes. Briana opted to leave her corporate job, Zach applied and was accepted to Wharton Business School and just one day after, they learned they would soon be parents.
Two years after the proposal in Paris, Law was born in November 2020, turning this pair into a party of three.
“It's been Zach and me for ten years. We know how we work. It's effortless at this point.” Teary eyed, Briana begins to speak on the transition to motherhood.
“So for me, this transition has been a little bit more difficult, especially with postpartum. I feel different physically. It impacts me emotionally. Sometimes, I don't even know what I'm feeling. This has been the craziest thing that I've ever done because there are things that I have no control over. My body has changed in the craziest ways, my hormones have changed, I'm still crying two months after giving birth. Zach has done an amazing job of reassuring me, which I've needed more in this past few months than I ever have.” In that moment, Briana leans into Zach intuitively.
Zach picks up, sharing his perspective on this phase of their lives and the way Bri is evolving, “It’s always a race to get back to where you were but you’re not who you were before, it’s okay to be something new and improved and better. We’re not going to work backwards, there’s no way you could go back to that. So what you get to do now is improve and evolve to this brand new thing that’s going to be even better than what you were before, but you got to give yourself time and grace to do that.”
Emotions filled the room, well, the Zoom; tangible, raw and real.
Briana and Zach shared a few songs that define their love which includes “While We’re Young” by Jhene Aiko and “Hussle and Motivate” by Nipsey Hussle. Check out the full playlist on Spotify.
